Lori Loughlin’s daughter rejects fraud allegations: ‘That’s not fair’

Lori Loughlin’s family was hit with a firestorm of bad publicity following her arrest in the college admissions scandal, but her daughters – Olivia Jade Giannulli and Isabella Rose Giannulli – have had the opposite experience.

On Friday, the younger sister of the Fuller House star broke her silence on the whole ordeal in an interview with US Weekly, saying that the backlash was “very frustrating”.

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“How are you going to go after one person and make her out to be the criminal?” Isabella said, suggesting that the entire scandal had been framed through a “negative lens”. “It’s not fair and it’s sexist,” she said.

Loughlin, a 49-year-old actress, and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, are two of more than 40 parents charged in a college admissions scandal. Loughlin is accused of paying bribes to her oldest daughter, Olivia, to get her into the University of Southern California, while her other daughter, Isabella, was allegedly rejected by USC, despite having been accepted into its fashion institute with a composite score of 930, despite having never been accepted into a college, anywhere, before.

Through her MyPillow website, Loughlin promised “my dream for my girls is to not only help them get into college, but to be successful there, too”. But she may have been short on some detail.

The college admissions scandal was described by Mark Riddell, the founder of the for-profit athletic-prep company Edge College & Career Network, as “the modern equivalent of selling your child a product”. In an appearance on the Today show, Riddell said: “You sell the product when your kid is in the crib, you sell the product when they’re in the bathtub. You don’t sell it when they’re in their bedroom. You’re selling it in the morning and the evening.”

Meanwhile, Olivia’s response to the news from her Twitter account may have taken some parents in a different direction – though she is far from the first parent to troll in the wake of scandal. The student and her account have called out for conspiracy theories that implicated Trump in the scandal. “I have 1 sister. If 1 of them did this honestly they are awful people … if your [sic] guilty the kids and parents are angry, I am too & rightfully so,” she wrote, before later reading: “The truth will come out & what we all have been taught to believe will be upheld”.

She has also been supportive of her family, whose house and belongings were reportedly targeted by paparazzi searching for photos of the eldest of the Loughlin daughters. The star later issued a statement to ABC News, saying “they have been pulled into this with no knowledge of how it will be used or what it will entail.”

Meanwhile, Isabella, who is reportedly trying to get into USC and has been living with her mom since her second semester at USC, says she wants to move out of their Los Angeles home.

“We should probably move out of the house when I finish school because, I feel like, I really feel there’s nothing better than home … because you always feel more protected,” she said. “But with that being said, having spent so much time with my mom, it will always be a special home for me,” she added.

Read more on the University of Southern California admissions scandal

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